has yet its seasons. You could hardly tell, if you did not know the
month, whether a space of sea or a series of waves, at Aldborough, say,
or at Dover, were summer or winter water; but in those fortunate regions
which are southern, yet not too southern for winter, and have thus the
strongest swing of change and the fullest pulse of the year, there are a
winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate
variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of
September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and
unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head
while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and the
vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can
rest; and where you float, there float also by you opalescent jelly-fish,
half transparent in the perfectly transparent water. An hour in the warm
sea is not enough. Rock-bathing is done on lonely shores. A city may be
but a mile away, and the cultivated vineyards may be close above the
seaside pine-trees, but the place is perfectly remote. You pitch your
tent on any little hollow of beach. A charming Englishwoman who used to
bathe with her children under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villa
in the motionless white evenings of summer put white roses in her hair,
and liked to sit out on a rock at sea where the first rays of the moon
would touch her.

You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing in the
world is more uninteresting than eleven o'clock. It is the hour of
mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o'clock on a shingly
beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing. Twelve has a
dignity always, and everywhere its name is great. The noon of every day
that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly. One
o'clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hour
of the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening and